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The Emergence of Radical/Critical Geography Within North America

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The Emergence of Radical/Critical Geography Within North America The Emergence of Radical/Critical Geography within North America Linda Peake1 Urban Studies Program, Department of Social Science York University, Canada [email protected] Eric Sheppard Department of Geography University of California, Los Angeles, USA [email protected] Abstract In this paper we aim to provide a historical account of the evolution of Anglophone radical/critical geography in North America. Our account is structured chronologically. First, we examine the spectral presence of radical / critical geography in North America prior to the mid-sixties. Second, we narrate the emergence of both radical and critical geography between 1964 / 1969 until the mid-1980s, when key decisions were taken that moved radical / critical geography into the mainstream of the discipline. Third, we examine events since the mid- 1980s, as radical geography merged into critical geography, becoming in the process something of a canon in mainstream Anglophone human geography. We conclude that while radical / critical geography has succeeded in its aim of advancing critical geographic theory, it has been less successful in its aim of 1 Published under Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2 Eric’s first exposure was as an undergraduate at Bristol in 1971 when the newly hired lecturer Keith Bassett, freshly returned from Penn State, brought a stack of Antipodes to one of his lectures. Linda’s radical awakening also came in the UK, in the late 1970s courtesy of her lecturers at Reading University. Sophie Bowlby took her The Emergence of Radical/Critical Geography in North America 306 increasing access to the means of knowledge production to become a peoples’ geography that is grounded in a desire for working towards social change. Purporting to provide a historical account of the evolution of Anglophone radical/critical geography in North America is a hazardous proposition. First, the sheer quantity of radical/critical geography within this relatively confined area of the globe is enormous: spanning more than forty years (and arguably much longer), and innumerable individuals, organizations, activities and academic and non- academic writings. This cannot possibly be captured adequately in a single paper, nor can definitive definitions of these wide ranging fields in terms of their content or purposes. Second, and relatedly, many such accounts are possible, each marked by the situated knowledge of the narrators. Our perspective is that of two relative latecomers to what at that time was known as radical geography; neither of us participated in the early years.2 In writing this paper, we have attempted to plumb the recollections of early participants we could identify, but inevitably what we write is not what they would have written. Our particular predilections about what is significant inevitably shape this account. This is not, then, the definitive story, but a provocation: one particular account that can only be enriched as others react to, correct, and differently narrate these events. Third, as critical scholars we must be alert to the occlusions made possible by the few already existing narratives of the emergence of radical geography in Anglophone North America—accounts that become canonical simply by dint of the lack of alternatives. In particular, we interrogate the conventional wisdom, today, that radical geography emerged out of Clark University with the publication of Antipode in 1969, and was primarily Marxist. This is the case, but there also was much more. Fourth, as geographers we must be alert to the geography of knowledge production. In interrogating conventional wisdom, therefore, we begin to disinter both the theoretical/ideological variegation, characterizing the field from its beginnings but unevenly though time, as well as outlining the complex spatialities connecting the US with Anglo-Canada and beyond. Our account is structured chronologically. First, we examine the spectral presence of radical / critical geography in North America prior to the mid-sixties. Second, we narrate the emergence of both radical and critical geography between 1964 / 1969 until the mid-1980s, when key decisions were taken that moved radical / critical geography into the mainstream of the discipline. Third, we examine events since the mid-1980s, as radical geography merged into critical geography becoming in the process something of a canon in mainstream Anglophone human geography. 2 Eric’s first exposure was as an undergraduate at Bristol in 1971 when the newly hired lecturer Keith Bassett, freshly returned from Penn State, brought a stack of Antipodes to one of his lectures. Linda’s radical awakening also came in the UK, in the late 1970s courtesy of her lecturers at Reading University. Sophie Bowlby took her to her first Women and Geography Group meeting, introducing her to Suzanne Mackenzie, among others, while John Short and Andrew Kirby introduced her to other radical work in the discipline. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2014, 13 (2), 305-327 307 Hauntings: Radical Geographers avant la lettre It might be expected that we begin in the tumultuous times of the mid and late 1960s, dating the birth of North American radical geography to 1969 (Castree 2000). The story has been widely told of a staid discipline, caught between a Hartshornian regionalist past and its aspirations to be recognized as a value-free spatial science, whose disengagement with the world was disrupted by the impact of the May 1968 student revolts in Europe and the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements in the United States (Peet 1977, 2000). But this would be to ignore the precursors of that time, those individual scholars already mapping out potential routes toward radical/critical geography. Four men are widely acknowledged as radical geographers whose political and academic contributions predated 1969, and since have been assessed and analyzed: the Russian anarcho- communist Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) and French anarchist Élysée Reclus (1830-1905), and the German and American Sinologists, Karl Wittfogel (1896- 1988) and Owen Lattimore (1900-89) (Clark and Martin 2004, Dunbar 1978, Galois 1976, Harvey 1983, Peet 1985).3 Yet others’ contributions have been overlooked. For example, Mary Arizona (Zonia) Baber (1862-1956), a founder of the Chicago Geographical Society, was committed to peace, antiracism, and conservation, and worked closely with Puerto Rican suffragist movements (Monk 2004). No doubt, Baber is just one of a number of radical geographers, otherwise gendered and racialised, whose contributions have been sidelined and then elided by the “1969 story”, and await recovery in the name of tracing multiple histories, situated knowledges, counternarratives, silences, and lacunae.4 By the mid 1960s, a handful of radical geographers were percolating the field, also shaping what was to happen in 1969. Most importantly in moving radical geography beyond the academy, Bill Bunge, a communist when he wrote his paean to quantitative geography (Bunge 1966, Akatiff, personal communication), co- founded the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI) with the African American community leader Gwendolyn Warren in 1968. The Expedition and Institute was committed to practicing the kind of radical pedagogy and activist research on issues of poverty and race widely espoused today by post-structural and feminist geographers; it operated at the University of Michigan, and then Michigan State, until the latter closed it at the end of 1970 (Heyman 2007, Horvath 1971). Clark Akatiff had entered UCLA’s graduate program in 1960 as a Marxist, was hired as an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in 1966 and participated in the Detroit Expedition (Akatiff 2007). Jim Blaut, life-long leftist, joined the faculty at Clark in 1967, having returned from five years in the 3 In 1952, former communist Wittfogel denounced Lattimore during the McCarthy hearings (Lattimore 1950). 4 Not least, Thelma Glass, a professor at Alabama State College, who helped establish the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery Alabama, which organized the Montgomery bus strike led by Martin Luther King (see George, Monk and Gaston 2004). The Emergence of Radical/Critical Geography in North America 308 Caribbean, including a stint in Puerto Rico where he joined its Movimiento Pro Independencia (Mathewson 2005, Santana 2005). In October 1967, Blaut and co- conspirator David Stea flew Jim’s plane to Washington D. C., to observe the countercultural attempt to ‘levitate the Pentagon’: Akatiff was at the protest (Akatiff, 1974b).5 When Ben Wisner arrived at Clark in 1968, radicalized by the anti-war movement and experiences in Tanzania, a small group of radical geographers was already active.6 While not self-identified as radical, several sympathetic geographers helped create space in a hostile disciplinary and political environment, across both Canada and the United States, including Jim Lemon, Robert McNee, Richard Morrill, Phil Wagner, Julian Wolpert, and Wilbur Zelinsky. Of course, what is striking about this list is its exclusivity. Neither women nor people of colour feature in accounts of this period of North American radical academic geography, yet the seeds of their participation were also sown during this time and they were to figure increasingly in developing both radical and critical geography, although this has been more the case for the former than the latter.7 Their absence in these reflections speaks strongly to the
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